Emissary of Soulfire

Exalted has always wanted you to swing with a single creature, and it has always struggled to prove that a lone attacker was worth building a deck around. This reframes what an exalted counter even is: instead of the printed exalted keyword that older cards simply came with, here it becomes something you spend a resource to place. The entry trigger hands you three energy, enough for one activation with a single counter left over, and after that the body settles into a 1/4 wall while you hunt for more fuel elsewhere. That is the tension the design leans into. Exalted rewards a solitary swing, but the creature paying for that swing is deliberately not the one meant to attack alone, and its energy stock is a one-time gift rather than a recurring engine, so the payoff has to be assembled from other sources. The sorcery-speed clause on the activation matters as much as the cost: you cannot slip an exalted counter onto an attacker mid-combat to blow out a block, which keeps every point of growth telegraphed and answerable. What it opens is a bridge between two mechanics that had lived in separate worlds, energy as a stockpiled currency and exalted as a combat multiplier. Turning a keyword that used to be a fixed printed ability into a placeable, payable counter is a second-order move that widens the design space around both, even when the surface rate reads quiet.